Mom Interviews

Caryl Stern, President, CEO of US Fund for UNICEF

Formerly worked with the Anti-Defamation Leauge

What's the most challenging thing, for you, about juggling career and motherhood?

The most challenging thing is TIME! How do you make it to the ball games, the school play, the UN meetings, the board meetings, the office meetings, and still find time to do your actual work and to make dinner! I need longer days and more days in the week!

Do you think that achieving work-life balance becomes easier as one's children grow older?

Bigger children -- bigger problems and bigger celebrations. When they’re little you control their schedules and they actually have a bedtime that is early enough to allow you some time. When they’re bigger this is not the case; you have to (and you want to) be available at all hours, in much less planned and controllable ways. So I treat it as journey and hope that even though mine may seem somewhat of a zig-zag each day, in the end I’ll get there!

What do you think makes work-life balance so difficult for women in the US?

I grew up believing you could/I could have it all. This is not true; you do have to give something up to get most of it! The US does not always create work environments that value family first concepts. I am fortunate that I get to create my work place values around this!

How do you carve out time for yourself?

What is time for myself? I read on airplanes, I get a manicure once a week so I can be unreachable and not doing anything else for an hour, I find refuge in the time I spend with my kids and my husband!

What's next on your life to-do list?

Next is hopefully staying with what I am doing long enough to see more progress! And then... who knows?

1 comment so far...

Where is the date of this article?

Did she say the world population tripled in 25 years??

I am very concerned by UNICEF's belief that children available for adoption, who are already relinquished by / abandoned by / rescued from (abuse by) their parents, are almost never better off being adopted internationally versus staying in whatever third-world facilities their birth country has to offer. I feel that they have an agenda against international adoption which causes them to push for restrictions that go far beyond protecting the interests of the children and birth parents, and actually harm them (e.g., by making them stay in third-world institutions for years when they could be in the arms of loving parents). They also are pro-abortion, considering abortion a better solution to family problems than adoption. I am also concerned by recent reports of falsified UNICEF numbers as well as simply the fact that it is run by the UN. I don't know how they get their funding for advertising that results in their receiving donations that would otherwise have gone to entities that are far more pro-child and pro-family. I just wish people were more aware that not all of their agendas are in line with mainstream US values.